Bealls Says They Will Destroy The Walmart Nazi T-Shirts

Reader Rob wrote to Bealls, the outlet store that was selling the infamous Walmart Nazi T-shirts, and they responded by thanking him for making them aware of the situation and promising to destroy the shirts.

Dear Rob,
Thank you for letting us know about the shirts. I forwarded your e
mail to our buying department. There is a notice going to all stores to
pull these shirts off of the floor and destroy them.
Thanks again for letting us know about this situation.

Customer Service

Is it Walmart policy to sell “recalled” products to outlet stores? Or is there a special policy specifically for cases like this?

Leaving the issue of Walmart selling Nazi paraphernalia aside for a moment, the saga of the Walmart Nazi T-shirt has taught us a lot about the life cycle of a recalled product, and none of it is good.

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I don’t see what the big deal is. So it’s a nazi emblem. Most people wouldn’t even know if someone didn’t make a big deal out of it to begin with.
I don’t think anyone who buys the shirt is giving tacit approval to the nazis.

Obey made a tshirt with that same skull on it…no one is banging down Shepard Fairey’s door to make him stop. Get over it. Its obviously more about poking at Wal-Mart than fretting over “Nazi” memorabilia.

You’re both wrong. The symbol is an ancient pagan solar symbol found all throughout Europe and spread by various tribes of Indo-Europeans in ancient times. The swastika is found in Israel simply because of migration of Indo-European tribes through there.

The Tocharians likely are the people who introduced the swastika to the ancient Chinese.

I’m a bit of a neo-paganist, so I do take a bit of offense when someone rewrites history just because they’re offended by Hitler’s use of a symbol native to Germans.

@asscore: You’ve completely missed the whole point of this saga. Whether right or wrong, Walmart said they would pull these off the shelves. They took many many months to get rid of them. This shows they are incompetent at recalls.
They proved they are incompetent at recalls by screwing up the dog food recall. Search the Consumerist for the details where some lady deliberately bought all the recalled pet food so the unknowing would not buy it. Walmart restocked it. She bought it again. They restocked it. Then they kicked the lady out of the store.

Is it even proper to be referring to the original symbols as “swastikas?” I was under the impression that the symbol (whatever its ultimate origins) was rotated 45 degrees by the Nazis before being labeled as the swastika. To me that’s a huge difference.

And before anyone starts moaning about how “the rotation doesn’t make a difference,” just think how odd some of our letters would look if you rotated them 45, 90, 180, or even reversed them. We might end up living in the “nu-twb Statms of Awmr/ua” (United States of America).

I don’t think Wal-Mart is behind this. They don’t normally send their stuff to another retailer to liquidate. They prefer to do it themselves.

According to the Miami-Herald, Wal-Mart sent these shirts back to the company that produced them, Miami-based Orange Clothing Company. The original Miami-Herald article is now behind their firewall, but I still have it posted on my blog.

You have the freedom to wear (almost) anything you want (see the Southwest post), but it’s hypocritical when a company claims it’s against the Holocaust but then it starts selling Nazi-related paraphernalia.

Please everyone, line up at your nearest outlet store to purchase some low price lead painted toys, e.coli infested meat and vegetables, and glistening antifreeze toothpaste. Don’t forget your pets either! They could be enjoying heaven with you while they have some melamine-flavored pet food.

It’s not a really difficult form to come up with (e.g., the famous navy base story), but it has become a symbol.

But anyway, the important thing is that it became a symbol and does carry meaning in our culture.
It’s like me putting a soviet symbol on my car and pretending that it’s an agricultural symbol. Wouldn’t fly.

I’m so glad I bought my Wal-Mart Nazi T-shirt before the Consumerist T-shirt Nazis had them all destroyed. Hey, look! Over there! A book that says something someone doesn’t like! Get the pitchforks and torches!

Consumerist brings news that Wal-Mart is still selling t-shirts with a Nazi-era graphic more than a year after they were recalled. As the site rightly points out, if Wal-Mart can’t get one t-shirt off its shelves, what does that mean for the millions of recalled toys tainted with lead?